Julia Grey
Seeing barefoot, shivering urchins begging on a cold winter’s night is not unu sual. What was unusual on that particular July night in 1995 was that my frien d Lee and I didn’t blindly breeze past them, or dismiss them with a 50c piece. Instead, we spoke to them as children.
Stanley (7), Rich (8) and Clayton (13) fed us a fair load of nonsense on that first night outside Bob’s Bar in Troyeville, Johannesburg. They claimed to be parentless and homeless, and led us to a locked-and-barred church where they s aid they slept.
Our response surprised even ourselves: we offered them a place to stay for the night. And perhaps they surprised themselves, too. They agreed to be driven o
ff into the night by two complete strangers.
That was the first, spontaneous step in a relationship that is now a year and a half old. The strength of all our commitment -the kids and ours -has been as tonishing. On average, they visit us two weekends a month. Like all kids, they are quite capable of shredding one’s peace of mind, but they also can be as c
harming as angels.
The details of their background (when we finally got the truth out of them!) a re bleak. Clayton and Stanley are brothers, who live in a squalid backroom wit h their mother, Selina. She spends her limited resources on living her life i n an almost constant state of “kaka-dingdong” (the boys’ word for “mindlessly drunk”) or “babalas” (“hungover”).
But she doesn’t beat her children, and although her work is prostitution, she is trying to get them something of an education.
Richard’s situation was more desperate. His mother, Lorraine, is one of those broken, kaka-dingdong women you may sometimes glimpse staggering along the ro
ad, her face swollen from the beating she last got. Lorraine contributed littl e but abuse to her son.
Things came to a head for Rich a week before Christmas 1995. We arrived on the Friday as arranged, and found only Clayton and Stanley waiting for us. They h
ad a heart-stopping tale to tell of a viciously drunk Lorraine, who had tried to force Rich to go with her, and when he resisted, had hit him across the hea d with “an iron” (a metal pole). Clayton, who had tried to intervene, received a knife-c
ut on his thumb for his trouble. All the brothers knew for sure was that Rich had blood pouring from a gash in his face and was somewhere with his mother.
Hours later, Rich arrived at my house. Both he and Clayton needed stitches. Ri ch had two pink plasters in the shape of an “X” on his forehead: we joked abou t “Vote for Rich” whilst we decided to contact the authorities.
This was not the first time we had contacted the Johannesburg Child Welfare So ciety (JCWS). Earlier we had taken all three kids there in the hope that the a uthorities could help. What became clear is that the JCWS is unable to substan tially address the needs of abused and neglected children -there is a complete dearth of government support and an enormous number of children suffering sim
ilar depri vations.
Over the past year, the Child and Family Unit of the JCWS alone has received 3 280 reports of, or enquiries about, child abuse. So it is not surprising that
nothing was done by the JCWS to help these three kids. The situation has to b
e life-threatening before resources can be spared.
Rich has the gash on his forehead to thank for his removal into a “place of sa fety”. He was placed in a children’s home in Soweto. Relative to some I have s een, this one does a good job.
Rich has just passed his first year of school, and the consequent growth in hi s self-esteem has been phenomenal. Of course, living in an institution is not an ideal existence, and he has run away twice.
But there are definite limits to what we can provide. The most we can offer ar e the two weekends a month in which we play loads of soccer and cricket, games of cards and “arlies” (marbles); slip in learning activities like drawing and
maths (which they are surprisingly keen on); and try to introduce them to as
many wonders of the world as we can (a trip to the game reserve, another to th e sea).
There is a noticeable plummet in everybody’s mood when we drop them off at the ir respective homes on Sunday evening. Only Clayton can muster a “goodbye”. Th e two younger ones close themselves behind heavy, serious faces. As I watch St anley make his way towards his broken-down home between broken-down people, he looks even more fragile than ever.